Why Cruz is better than Trump

Paul Waldman writes in the Washington Post on why the GOP establishment should endorse Cruz over Trump:

Marco Rubio, the Republican establishment’s golden boy/fallback position, isfloundering. If he doesn’t prevail in the winner-take-all Florida primary next Tuesday — and he’s currently trailing there by 15-20 percent — it may really be just a two-man race, between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

That would leave GOP elites in a position where their only chance at stopping a candidate they find terrifying is a candidate they find loathsome.

Not a great choice – especially considering how strong the initial field was.

I’m not going to argue that Ted Cruz is a great option for the GOP. But between him and Trump, it shouldn’t even be a close call. In fact, many of the things they hate about Cruz would be completely irrelevant if he were to become president, or even their party’s nominee.

If you’re a party insider facing this choice, you have three main things to consider. First, which one of these candidates is more likely to win in November? Second, what would happen if either one became president? And third, if you do lose the election, what happens after?

That’s a very good way to look at it.

On the first question, the truth is that we don’t know for sure, but there are strong reasons to think that both Cruz and Trump would be headed for big defeats.

The current general election polling (which is not very reliable at this stage) has Cruz 4% behind Clinton, Rubio tied with Clinton and Trump 6% behind Clinton.

What if either one of them actually got elected? Here’s where Cruz would be vastly preferable for Republicans. Trump, who doesn’t appear to have any sincere beliefs on issues, would likely uphold conservative positions on some things and flip on others, whenever he saw political or personal advantage in doing so.

Cruz, on the other hand, believes pretty much everything establishment Republicans do on matters of policy. As Lindsey Graham says, “if Ted’s the alternative to Trump, he’s at least a Republican and conservative.” Cruz’s arguments with others in the party have been over tactics.

Yep Cruz actually stands for thins he believes in.

And if he were president, Cruz would no longer be rebelling against the party establishment, because he’d be the leader of the party. The arguments that have consumed the GOP for the last seven years would become all but irrelevant with any Republican in the White House. President Cruz would deliver them exactly what they’ve wanted: ACA repeal, tax cuts, regulatory rollback, military spending increases, conservative judges, and so much more. The only question would be whether he’d develop carpal tunnel syndrome from signing all the bills a Republican Congress sent to his desk.

Heh.

But Cruz actually winning is unlikely. So what if he were the nominee and lost? The party would be in a much better position than it would be if Trump ran and lost. The threat of a Trump nomination is that it could tear the GOP asunder. There may be an independent candidacy funded by conservative donors, or maybe even the start of a whole new party. Even if those things don’t happen, Trump’s nomination will likely cause all kinds of problems for down-ballot Republicans, and could deliver the Senate and maybe even the House to the Democrats, giving President Hillary Clinton the chance to accomplish who knows how many liberal goals during her presidency.

I suspect there will be a serious third party candidate of Trump is the GOP nominee.

The logic argued is very strong – as much as the Republican establishment hate Cruz, he is a vastly better choice for them than Trump.

Donald Trump won both Republican primaries Tuesday night (Michigan and Mississippi), extending his large delegate count lead much to the chagrin of Mitt Romney and the Jekyll Island crowd. Marco Rubio was a distant fourth ending the night with no delegates.

However, while the Trump victory is making headlines, the yuuge news of the night is Bernie Sanders beating Hillary Clinton in Michigan – against all poll expectations (with the Clinton campaign explaining “they misunderstood the electorate.” This was such a shock that CNN still wouldn’t admit it until well over 90% of the vote was in despite Sanders’ 4pt lead… Clinton had a 21pt lead in Michigan before today… read more via hyperlink above …

tom hunter

Okay – back to mikenmild’s foot-tapping question.

To start with I should make it clear that I always see a need for a public component in areas like health and education. It’s like unemployment insurance, there will always be failures in the private sector system and those people need to be caught if bigger societal problems are to be avoided. I just don’t agree the idea that a public system should occupy even 50% of the space, let alone 80 or 100%. I think that just leads to outcomes that are worse overall.

So with US Medicaid.

I think the best way would have been for the Federal goverment to provide block grants to each state to provide Medicaid to those who cannot afford health insurance. The state would be free to decide the parameters of who gets it, to allow for knowledge of local conditions and what sort of health insurance it would be – nothing gold-plated, but including a catastrophic component for things like strokes, cancer, heart, etc, with another component that would force the insured to fork out at least a bit of money for little things like a visit to the doctor, and that would be decided on income: below a certain income level you don’t pay anything. An adjusted deductible in other words. And it would allow the Medicaid insurance to be tailored: no need for prescriptive pre-natal care to be written in for 50 year old woman!

At the Federal level there would have to be laws passed that insured that any private sector health insurance had to match the Medicaid ones, so that people could move off Medicaid, once their income increased beyond the Medicaid point, and be sure they were getting the same service. The Feds could also calculate the block grant based on their estimate of the number of uninsured in a state and what they would like to get that down to. The block-grant approach would avoid the current result where states desperately try to cut costs in a recession by cutting Medicaid payments – which just makes the whole system perform worse.

That would require re-writing some of the stupid restrictions that came with the original 1965 act (you can’t change enrollment criteria, you can’t structure the benefit in different ways). Obamacare simply went in for more prescription – which is what centalised bureaucrats do when confronted by problems created by previous you-can’t-think-for-yourself prescriptions.

As far as Medicare is concerned, well that’s a huge fuckup to try and fix now. The only way I can see it even getting started is to convince the Gen X, Y and Millenials to ring-fence the damned system so that everybody in it now gets what they were promised, and anybody within ten years of qualifying gets that too. There may be a chance because the young ones can read the numbers (at least a chunk of them) and they are already beginning to suspect that they’re going to be shafted by these pay-as-you-go systems.

A new Medicare system – health insurance for the retired – would have to still follow the realities of acturial tables, meaning that people would have to get that insurance early in their lives OR have a system that is block-granted like Medicaid and handled locally. It’s a hell of a problem though when the healthcare costs of the elderly balloon out with more and better treatments. On top of that Medicare only got passed in the first place by LBJ promising doctors, hospitals and the rest, that there would be no restrictions on what they charged (unlike Medicaid). The combined effect of those elements is what has driven Medicare’s costs at 13% per year, every year, for half a century now. That’s an awfully tough monster to stop, but something has to be done soon or it will fuck the USA. I’ve hardly got the answers here – hopeful guesses at best – but it cannot continue as it has, and the old people in the system are going to have to deal with that as they do here in NZ.

And of course, surrounding all this, is the fucked up private care system in the USA. In the wake of Obamacare there seem to be some basic ideas from the GOP candidates such as:
– wiping out state-line restrictions and allowing insurance companies to compete across the country, along with hospitals and the like
– giving private citizens the same tax break currently extended to employer insurance (one of the biggest reasons for the huge cost jump between them)
– allowing insurers to do what they do in other areas, provide many different types of insurance: if you’re only 25 you don’t want “comprehensive” care, just catastrophic, and you’re willing to pay out of your pocket for lesser shit. With fucking Obamacare you have to pay through the nose for shit you don’t want, because big prescriptive, dumb categories like Gold, Silver and Bronze are all that count. No wonder the young and healthy are avoiding them like the plague and taking the IRS fine.

All these are now accepted in the proposals of even The Donald. Back in 2008 those suggestions from McCain raised howls, and he was too ignorant of the debate to be able to counter them. Such things might have a chance of putting the breaks on health care inflation by enabling more competition, which is really the only thing that can make this work, as in other areas of life.

tom hunter

… the yuuge news of the night is Bernie Sanders beating Hillary Clinton in Michigan …

Bigger news than the GOP side of things all right, and yet another example, as if any more were needed, of what a godawful candidate the woman is. Looks like it was a repeat of New Hampshire in one respect:

Exit polls showed that around 40 percent of those who voted in Michigan’s Democratic primary don’t think Clinton is honest. I assume that the vast majority of these folks will vote for Clinton in the general election anyway. But if Clinton is viewed this way by so many Democrats, imagine how the rest of the electorate must view her.

I think she’s got big probems – and the dispiriting nature of her death march to the Democratic nomination is what’s also driving the poor turnouts for the Democrat primaries. That points to poor turnout in the general – although it’s not a guarantee. In 1988 and 2004 the Democrats had very good primary turnouts, but it did not help in the general election: something for the GOP to ponder.

A new poll by Rasmussen Reports conducted on March 6 and 7 shows that if Donald Trump is denied the GOP nomination for presidential candidate, he could run as a third-party candidate with much of his base intact.

Among Republican voters, 36% say they are “likely” to vote for Trump if he runs as a third-party presidential candidate – and 24% of all GOP voters are “very likely” to give Trump their vote if he chooses a third-party route. … read more via hyperlink above …

All_on_Red

On Obamacare
DOCTORS, HOSPITALS GETTING STIFFED FOR MILLIONS OF DOLLARS BY OBAMACARE CO-OPS: A dozen of the 24 Obamacare health insurance co-ops established at a cost of $2.5 billion in 2012 have failed (and more are expected to do so). Now, hundreds of doctors, hospitals and other health care providers who served co-op policyholders are being muscled aside by federal bureaucrats claiming the government should be the first creditor in the bankruptcy line.

Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group reports the “Medical Society of New York estimates that hundreds of millions of dollars are owed to doctors and hospitals due to collapse of Health Republic of New York, the largest Obamacare co-op.” That’s just one state. Expect the total losses to be in the billions when all the accounting is completed.

All_on_Red

Mikey
Sure the Trend matters. The trend here is that because there are no jobs, there are people who were looking for jobs, but have given up looking for jobs. So regardless of whether they are included in the ‘actively seeking work’ stat, the fact still remains they would still like a job but because there aren’t any they are still unemployed.
By not including this group it’s pretty disingenuous of the Labour dept.So, ‘real’ unemployment is over 10%

The harder the Republican aristocracy tries to derail Trump, the more convincing his victories become, in a kind of self-fulfilling, status quo-destroying loop, and now that Michigan has proven just how divided the Democratic vote truly is, it seems even more likely that the brazen billionaire may indeed end up taking the oath of office. … read more via hyperlink above …

Seems like they are taking all the fun out of crony capitalism … the kids might now need to get real jobs … like it used to be … CRONY CAPITALISM; I WANT TO BE A CRONY … YOUTUBE …

deadrightkev

Primary turnout numbers don’t lie, these are the facts.

Last week’s Super Tuesday voting numbers favored Republicans by about 2.5 million ballots. VA’s Super Tuesday primary saw more than 1 million Republicans cast ballots, shattering the 2000 record by more than 50 per cent.

A similar record was set in TN with more than 800,000 primary voters. Democratic primaries lagged far short of their high participation watermark in 2008.

In VA, that deficit was more than 200,000 votes. In SC more than 738,000 Republicans cast primary ballots on Feb. 20th. A week later, Democrats received 367,000 voters in the same state. Cruz finished last night 175,000 fewer votes than Trump, that is impressive.

Tell me again why Cruz is better than Trump DPF?

What skills and experience does Cruz have that Trump does not have in truckloads to reverse the disaster that is America?

Cruz has almost nothing to sell and cannot even build relationships or negotiate. Trump has all the skills and ability. He is the only hope and people know it.

deadrightkev

DifferentPerspective

“And the great thing is, this reaction to media lies and political hacks will be here just in time mess shit up for the 2017 election,”

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if a Trump popped out of the woodwork before 2017? Unlikely but you never know. Someone that has the balls to take it to the media and expose Key and little for second rate PM options they are?

My strong support for Trump is because I am optimistic, rightly or wrongly, if he can be president it will change the global landscape for countries like NZ and Australia that have also been fucked over by progressives such as Key and Turnbull.

Cruz is a serial liar, period, and a really bad liar at that (to quote Trump).
And unlike Trump, he’s already been bought by the corporate lobbyists.

Trump’s honesty is a breath of fresh air, regardless of whether you agree with him or not.
What you see is what I believe you will get, eventually, after he’s dealt a blow to all the corruption in Washington.

Regarding your comments about ‘progressive’ types, I am sure you will find many pearls of wisdom among these video posts ^_^

Manolo

mikenmild

Perhaps when considering Trump’s ability to wall off Mexico you should recall his many business failures rather than his ability to build an ice-skating rink.
His hand are too small to build anything much, anyway.

Manolo

I do not recall any of this magnifying-glass stuff and scrutiny on Trump today ever being applied to the candidate and then junior senator from Illinois, Barack Hussein Obama, who sailed unnoticed and protected by the liberal MSM.

Neil Bush, the son of President George H. W. Bush, who defrauded U.S. taxpayers out of $1.5 billion dollars in the savings and loan scam, and later peddled influence for the Chinese government, (who plied him with Chinese prostitutes) has formally endorsed Senator Ted Cruz for president. You can’t make this stuff up.

Trump’s recent pivot to placate potential moderate voters may already be reaping results, and in a most unexpected place – the liberal bastion of Hollywood.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the entertainment industry’s rare conservatives (and independents) are lining up behind Trump — the real-estate mogul considered one of their own as a former TV star and producer. … read more via hyperlink above …

Anyone who thinks the Democratic Party isn’t imploding for the exact same reasons the Republican party is imploding is purposefully ignoring reality.

Legions of pundits are crawling out of the woodwork to gloat over the implosion of the Republican Party. Corrupt, crony-capitalist, Imperial over-reach–good riddance.

But far fewer pundits dare declare that the other corrupt, crony-capitalist party of Imperial over-reach–yes, the Democratic Party–is imploding, too, for the same reason: it too is rotten to the core and exists solely to protect the privileges of the few at the expense of the many. … read more via hyperlink above …